Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know

Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know, directed by Peter Galison, is a documentary interweaving the Event Horizon Telescope team's effort to link the world's highest altitude observatories into an Earth sized telescope to capture the first image of a black hole, with Stephen Hawking and his team's attempt to solve the black hole information paradox. Hawking died during filming, in 2018, just days after completing his theory on the fate of information falling into a black hole with his colleagues; the physicists gathered after his death both to mourn him and to push closer to resolving the paradox. In real life, the Event Horizon Telescope team announced the first direct image of a black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy in 2019, revealed through six simultaneous press conferences worldwide; the achievement was named Science magazine's Breakthrough of the Year, and the team won the Breakthrough Prize. Who it's for: anyone curious about a science documentary weaving the effort to photograph a black hole together with Stephen Hawking's final theoretical work, completed just days before his death. Who it's not for: those wanting a light, surface level science popularization, since the film engages with advanced physics detail at a high level.